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Maybe I am looking at this incorrectly?

Using the latest data on Worldometers, as I write this, the US has 243,756 fatalities from (or at least partially triggered by) COVID-19, and 6,482,816 recoveries. That works out to 3.624% fatalities out of 6726572 known resolved cases.

Because of the large number of asymptomatic cases, many of which go uncounted, I am willing to accept that 4x the number of known resolved cases are in the form of unaccounted infections (cases). I’ll go even further and assume NONE of those uncounted cases result in a COVID-19 triggered fatality. This results in a simply calculated infection fatality rate of 0.725%.

I further estimate that last number to be “too high” for projection into the future, as a good part of it comes from early on in the pandemic, and we have better treatments now. How high it is, I don’t know. If someone could pull out from the data the numbers of resolved cases and fatalities for just the last two months, a more accurate infection fatality rate projection into the future could likely be estimated.

Now, I am under no illusions as to how long recovered case immunity from COVID-19 may last — it IS a coronavirus, after all. In any event, to attain true “herd immunity” in the US, even on a temporary basis, we need to have, oh, maybe 300 million people as resolved cases in a year or so, assuming no vaccine. I think that’s a reasonable number assuming little to no mitigation.

Even if the infection fatality rate drops as low as 0.2% — this assumes 300 million cases in one year does not swamp the health care system in some periods — this results in 600k fatalities in a year. I find that much “extra” death of my countrymen and women difficult to accept, and I think it is a conservative estimate. It is also almost double what we have averaged so far.